U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#261

Post by whydoyoucare » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:09 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #188

whydoyoucare wrote: post #20

University education has a been a "baseline" to determine qualified candidates. It also sorta implies broadened horizons, overall mature thought process, and several other qualities that are desirable the advisors/staffers. What other alternatives exists to University education that impart the same level of knowledge and understanding to an individual that can be consistently measured? If education is expensive, then…

College education implies and signals anything people want it to. As the value of a college education has approached zero, its proponents impose on it unquantifiable and unfalsifiable qualities as justifications. >college = maturity >college = growth >college = intelligence >college = responsbility >college = you can see a task through >college = diligence >college = social skills >college = well-rounded, interesting…

Can you substantiate your "value of a college education has approached zero" statement with data please?

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#262

Post by anon_user123 » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:15 PM UTC

Lol at anyone who thinks this is for the reason people think.

The real reason Craig's office did this is because there are a lot of political active, non college-educated DFL staffers. Many of them didn't go through college or just didn't to begin with. Many of these folks are non-white (particularly, Somali, where Minneapolis is one of the largest enclaves for Somali refugees in the US).

This is just to let the very active, motivated, driven, and hard-working politicos like them into Congress. This is good.

Source: I live in Craig's district and state/local politics.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#263

Post by whydoyoucare » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:17 PM UTC

jcrawfordor wrote: post #73

whydoyoucare wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is rare to gain relevant work experience without having a basic framework for the said work, and consistency to measure that basic framework from a pool of candidates, both which come from college/university education. Equivalency can be established for senior positions, not entry level ones. I assume the staffers do have entry level positions. Can a plumber or an electrician claim to possess experience to become…

Honestly, tradework like plumbing or electrical might be a surprisingly good qualification for entry-level congressional staff positions. Project management, scheduling, finance, and perhaps most importantly dealing with (sometimes pissed off) customers/constituents and the tradeoffs of what is possible, versus feasible, versus affordable. Realistically a lot of the function of undergraduate degrees (in fields withou…

For any hiring, there is required to be a minimum baseline. That has been college education so far, since it yields consistent and repeatable results (less work for hiring managers when they know someone has a 4 year engineering degree, as opposed to someone who has been educated in the school of life, don't you think?)

However way you look at it, hiring managers are going to require some baseline. What that baseline should be is debatable, and you can actually expand it to include trades like plumbing and electrical (many requirements do that).

But removing the college education requirement entirely is basically (a) increasing the burden on hiring manager, and (b) solving the wrong problem.

The real problem highlighted by the article is cost of college education, which needs to be addressed. Instead the proposal is let's hire highschool dropouts.

Let me ask this -- if college education is made affordable, will your position still be the same?

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#264

Post by kevviiinn » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:18 PM UTC

hindsightbias wrote: post #165

comte7092 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? Political liberalism goes well beyond the narrow understanding that exists within the US, wherein the label has grown to be largely incoherent/redefined to mean whatever is mainstream within the Democratic Party.

TIL Kissinger and Nixon were Demorats. Along with apparently Reagan, Bush Sr, W. Who knew.

Considering liberals aren't leftists I'm not surprised

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#265

Post by whydoyoucare » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:18 PM UTC

whydoyoucare wrote: post #261

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College education implies and signals anything people want it to. As the value of a college education has approached zero, its proponents impose on it unquantifiable and unfalsifiable qualities as justifications. >college = maturity >college = growth >college = intelligence >college = responsbility >college = you can see a task through >college = diligence >college = social skills >college = well-rounded, interesting…

Can you substantiate your "value of a college education has approached zero" statement with data please?

Add to that, let's assume college education is made affordable, will your position still remain the same?

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#266

Post by anon_user123 » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:18 PM UTC

dopeboy wrote: post #146

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #34

I appreciate the gesture but let's be real here. It's not like the requirement ever mattered. Just like a white house internship, nobody was getting a job as a congressional staffer without a recommendation from someone worth listening to.

Former congressional intern and WH intern (and later WH staff) here - it's possible to get those internships without a recommendation from someone worth listening to. I would go so far as to say it's mildly common.

Can confirm - there are always some folks who slip by the nepo. My best friend became a WH Intern with no particular 'in' except for his past [hard] work with a state campaign.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#267

Post by imranq » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:20 PM UTC

chaostheory wrote: post #243

chongli wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all. I definitely believe large numbers of liberal arts schools are having problems. But my school (University of Waterloo) has only seen dramatic surges in enrolment over the past 5 years. They're putting up new buildings like crazy just to accommodate all of them! And we're not talking sports centres or rec complexes, we're talking about big lecture halls and buildings full of classrooms and study spaces!

This phenomena doesn’t apply to elite institutions.

We have a bimodal distribution. Elite universities whose prestige is already established have an "embarrassment of riches" in terms of applicant pool, whereas middling and low ranked universities without a moat are facing enrollment cliffs.

Applicants are trying to go big or go home (and learn online instead)

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#268

Post by xyzzyz » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:20 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #239

xyzzyz wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a cop in Germany is much easier and less risky job than in US, because they have 50% more cops per capita while having something like 15% the crime rate of US. This means that, as a very rough estimate, there is something like 16 times more crimes per cop in US than in Germany. This is made even worse by things like US criminal being much more insane and erratic than German ones (Germany has a more collectivist…

Wild to suggest that the US's issue is not incarcerating enough people considering we are near the top of the global leaderboards on that front. Specifically in comparison to Germany, the incarceration rate is almost 8x higher in the US. You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. This has all sorts of neg…

> Wild to suggest that the US's issue is not incarcerating enough people considering we are near the top of the global leaderboards on that front. Specifically in comparison to Germany, the incarceration rate is almost 8x higher in the US.

Yes, we are not incarcerating enough people, as clearly evidenced by the fact that we have a lot of repeat criminals, who commit a lot more crime than Germans.

> You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. (…)

This is a problem, but it’s not what’s causing criminals to rob stores, carjack random people, or do drive by shootings. If we made US cops as professional as German cops, we’d still have huge crime problem. In fact, having grown up in Poland (which is very low crime society), my experience tells me that prosecuting and jailing criminals is significantly more important than professionalism of police force, as Polish cops are significantly less professional than American ones.

> Simply hiring more cops and throwing more people in jail isn't going to fix things. That should be obvious because that is all we ever seem to attempt in the US and the situation isn't getting better.

I strongly disagree. We did start mass incarceration around early-to-mid 1990, and it did, in fact, solve a lot of crime problems. As the percentage of population in prison steadily went up, the crime rate steadily went down. As we started reducing incarceration rates in early 2010s, the crime rate started going back up again, and this greatly accelerated starting from 2020, with the growth of anti-policing and anti-prosecution movements.

Just to emphasize this: the incarceration rate is down a lot from its peak in ~2010 or so. It’s down by more than a third. We no longer just throw people in jail, we do quite the opposite in fact, and the situation is getting worse than when we just jailed criminals.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#269

Post by ryan93 » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:32 PM UTC

wolverine876 wrote: post #173

Instead of better educating our population, the low-tax / anti-intellectual / authoritarian-reactionaries have convinced the population that they don't need education. With education, they might aim for socio-economic advancement (remember the American Dream?), think for themselves, challenge the established order (edit: i.e., they might decide to become the powerful and the leaders themselves). Now they know their p…

Selection effects are unimaginably strong on this subject.

Re: U.S. Rep. Angie Craig drops college requirement for staffers

#270

Post by stainablesteel » Fri, Apr 28, 2023, 11:53 PM UTC

electriclove wrote: post #231

stainablesteel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i completely agree, the stress induced from the process of prepping for college and jumping through other bureaucratic hoops is not worth the cost and the cost is not worth the end result i do pharmaceutical work, and my employer will only hire people with bachelors degrees but i swear i could teach this to a middle schooler. there's no reason we can't allow people to learn from life rather than learn for bureaucrati…

I totally agree but I don’t see how the system will change. I certainly can’t convince my employer, can you?

the change will come from all the people that already realize it, give it ~10-20 years